The Third Revelation (3 page)

“I see. I need to know something. You've clearly dug into this investigation. You're following up on all the leads. Why did you ask for me?”

This was the important question. Traeger hadn't come all this way to get a crime report. What lay behind these killings? Why did the Vatican think Traeger could help?

Rodriguez took a deep breath. “The Russian ambassador seems somehow linked to what has happened. He had been importuning Cardinal Maguire to release some materials from the Vatican Archives to his government.”

“I take it he is asking after my old acquaintance Ali Agca?”

Rodriguez smiled grimly. “Yes. Incessantly.”

“That explains what I'm doing here. I worked cleanup on that one. You were sent my report on the assassination attempt, were you not?”

“And the British report.”

“Killing four people would not be a good way to get hold of that material.”

Rodriguez shrugged.

“Are there other possible explanations than the reports on the attempted assassination? That was a long time ago. Very old news.”

“We suspect that these killings may be connected with something even longer ago than the attempt on John Paul's life.”

Traeger waited.

“What do you know of Fatima?” Rodriguez asked.

“She was the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed,” Traeger said.

Rodriguez smiled. “Wrong Fatima. Think Portugal.”

“Nineteen seventeen?” Traeger said, surprised.

Rodriguez was impressed. “Your memory must be a hard drive. Yes, when the Blessed Virgin appeared to three peasant children.”

“Are you sure? That seems unlikely. And it isn't my area of expertise.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “What little evidence we have seems to point there.”

Traeger waited for more information, but the silence stretched between them. Rodriguez did not elaborate.

And Traeger did not pursue it. That possibility would not justify his being involved.

So, silence still hanging between them, both men ate. Traeger relished his soup, his pasta, and his veal, and the hovering waiter kept the wine flowing.

“You are paying for this, aren't you?” Rodriguez smiled when he said it, but that didn't mean he wasn't serious. “The CIA's expense accounts are legendary.”

Traeger sighed and got out a charge card with his cover identity on it.

“Just remember, the next one is on you.”

 

 

Traeger had spent a lot of time in Rome. He spoke the language. He'd done extensive work with the Vatican at the height of the Cold War and during the Soviet Union's collapse, back in the late seventies and eighties. He was the official author of the agency's secret report on the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. He was essentially the CIA's man in Rome, so he had led the team that conducted the investigation into the shooting. And he hadn't liked what he'd turned up. The Russians, as represented by the KGB, had their hands all over that plot, in Traeger's opinion.

Traeger's digging led him to believe that Zilo Vassilev, the Bulgarian military attaché in Rome, had masterminded it. Among the connecting threads that made Agca's assassination attempt unlikely to be a lone-gunman attack was the fact that Agca's shooting of the pope was not his first political assassination. Agca had already killed for political reasons. On February 1, 1979, Agca murdered Abdi Ipekci, editor of a moderate newspaper called
Milliyet
in Istanbul. Agca was then working under the orders of a group called the Grey Wolves, a radical terrorist organization seeking to destabilize Turkey.

Though only Agca was present when the trigger was pulled, the op had the strong scent of state-sponsored terror. Traeger had figured back then that the Russians were worried about what a popular and dynamic pope from Poland and his apparent intention to unravel the Communist Party might do or say. It turned out that they had good reason to worry.

But that was all long ago, in the past. The USSR had imploded, democracy blossomed in the satellite states, and Pope John Paul II lived into old age despite the assassination attempt and died of natural causes. Traeger had left the agency two years ago. These days he gave his full attention to the computer consultant business that had always been his cover, and spent his free time—a novel concept in his world—keeping in shape by playing lots of tennis and golf. After all, he'd just hit fifty when he retired from the CIA. He looked forward to many years of normal living.

Everyone around Traeger had noticed the change.

“You are traveling less,” Bea, his secretary, said when he asked her to set up the tickets to Italy. “Is this trip business or pleasure?”

“Both,” he said, hoping this would be true.

Bea had been with Traeger longer than it would have been polite to mention. He had often wondered how much she knew of his undercover work for the government. Of course he didn't ask her what she thought.

If she knew anything about his shadow life, it was their little secret.

Where, Traeger wondered, did such devoted women come from?

In the Washington, D.C., area, there is a notorious surplus of women. They arrive fresh and young and ambitious, but the unfavorable ratio of men to women keeps most of them single. Bea was perilously close to fifty, but she must have dismissed all thoughts of marriage years ago. A shame. But then he himself was a monk. Many agents become serial monogamists in D.C.'s happy hunting ground, but Traeger had recoiled at the thought of placing the heavy burden of his work on the innocent shoulders of a spouse. But lately . . . Traeger shook the thought away.

“Traveling less, but enjoying it more,” Traeger had said to Bea. He let the impression that he was off to Rome for a lark stand. She sighed.

“It's the one city I long to see.”

A bizarre thought popped into Traeger's mind.
Ask her to come along
. The thought seemed more of a joke than a real possibility. Already his mind was full of the task ahead.

He had been approached through the usual channels. Dortmund asked him to lunch in an out-of-the-way place in Alexandria. The agency man's crew cut was now snow white, his eyes full of secrets. Dortmund had been Traeger's chief until he retired.

“Do you read the papers?” Dortmund asked.

“The Vatican guard's murder?”

Dortmund rewarded him with a smile. Almost from the beginning they had been able to read one another's minds. “The Vatican murders.”

“Murders?”

Traeger got the real story then; how two cardinals and a priest went down as well as the basilica guard. It was clear that Dortmund sensed a connection to the Ali Agca affair and the attempted assassination of a pope. Neither of them had been satisfied with the report Traeger had written. But neither had they seen enough of a link to justify military action against the real instigators of the plot.

“There must be something else we can pin this to. We know that there's someone else behind it.”

“Ali Agca insisted he was working alone,” Traeger said.

“Bah.”

“I know, I know. The whole mess has to go back to the Russians.” But the young Traeger had been unable to do anything but fume.

Dortmund had not needed to spell out his current suspicions to Traeger over lunch in Alexandria. Half a dozen disaffected agents were loose in the world. The Russian president had been in the KGB, but not all his former colleagues had been so upwardly mobile. How could they wean themselves from the intrigue and violence that had always defined their lives? And there would be smoldering resentment at the way their empire had melted away. Dortmund was fearful that one of them was involved in the killings in the Vatican. At that Alexandria luncheon with Traeger, he'd said he wanted his own man in Rome now. Both to help the Vatican put a stop to the trouble and put a lid on the news.

Traeger agreed to go.

 

 

But the connection between today's murders and yesterday's assassination attempt was fragile indeed. The only reason the Vatican had to regard these recent murders as connected with the assassination attempt on John Paul II was the repeated demands of the Russian ambassador that all documents concerning the Ali Agca affair be turned over to his government.

 

 

Traeger learned about this small piece of the puzzle from Rodriguez in the restaurant in Trastevere.

“He had visited Maguire that very day,” Rodriguez said. “Not an hour before the murder.”

“Would the Russians have known of the rooftop villa?”

“Of course. It's no secret. Maguire was proud of the place and liked to show it to people.”

“Are you sure the Russian ambassador left the library?”

“Father Crowe put him on the elevator. That was when Crowe got a glimpse of the assassin. The killer came out of the elevator when the doors opened.”

“As I said, I'll want to talk to Crowe first.”

Rodriguez leaned forward and dropped his voice. “The killer moved fast and freely.” A pause. “He might have gotten to the pope.”

Traeger nodded.

“Of course security has been increased exponentially,” Rodriguez said.

“After the horse has been stolen,” Traeger observed.

“What?” Rodriguez did not know the saying.

Traeger spelled it out for him.

“Ah. No doubt you will want to speak to the head of the guard.”

“After Crowe. Why did you mention Fatima?”

“The third secret.”

“Ah.”

The Blessed Virgin Mary had warned at Fatima that the pope would be assassinated. Had She been proved wrong?

“John Paul II always credited Mary with saving his life,” Rodriguez said, and the two men fell silent.

“It stopped being a game long ago.”

Father Brendan Crowe accompanied the body of Cardinal Maguire back to Ireland for burial—a Mass in the cathedral at Ennis with half the bishops in the country crowded into the sanctuary, the primate down from Armagh officiating. Old classmates, former mentors from Maynooth, and cousins galore treated him with that chummy deference the Irish excel at.

“You'll be going back, Brendan?” they would ask.

He was going back. He said it as if pronouncing sentence on himself, but the truth was Ireland seemed foreign to him, prosperous even here in the western counties. How young he had been when they sent him off to study in Rome; what an eternity ago that seemed.

“A dreadful business, Brendan,” the primate said in a low voice. He was the only mourner who knew how Maguire had died.

“We have here no lasting city, Your Eminence,” he said. The unctuous words were out before he could stop them.

A bow of the head. “No, indeed. At least you do not. When do you return to Rome?”

Did the cardinal imagine for Brendan a clerical future like that of the man they were burying?

“Almost immediately.”

“Is your mother still with us?”

“Gone to God, Your Eminence.” How trippingly on the tongue such phrases came. Both his parents were dead, and he felt no inclination to linger with his cousins.

“You must keep me informed.” Again, the primate's voice had lowered.

Brendan had said he would, and the following day he boarded an Aer Lingus flight to Rome, wondering what he was flying back to. Father John Burke came to Fiumicino to meet his plane, and on the drive into the city Crowe told the younger priest of Maguire's funeral. John Burke, like the mourners in Ennis, thought Maguire had died of natural causes. At the Domus Sanctae Marthae, Burke insisted on carrying Crowe's bag, and they rose in the silent elevator.

“You must be exhausted, Brendan.”

“Sit down, sit down. I brought some Jameson's.”

He poured them each a dollop and sat back in his chair. It came almost as a surprise to realize how tired he was.

“Did he have a history of heart failure, Brendan?”

Crowe looked at young Father John Burke when he asked the question. John had Irish ancestors, of course, but to Crowe he seemed a generic American. Most of the Irish in the world lived anywhere but in Ireland, but it was difficult for Crowe to think of them as the genuine article.

“He was killed, John.”

“What?”

“Stabbed in the chest.”

Burke reacted as to a macabre joke, studying Crowe's face.

“But
L'Osservatore Romano
said . . .” He stopped. “My God.”

“There were four murders in all that day.”

“I don't believe it!”

“Well, it's not an article of faith. Simply a fact.”

Crowe felt that he was corrupting youth by divulging this, but there was something faintly distasteful as well as attractive in the American priest's naïveté. Burke was young, but he had been in Rome long enough for disillusion to set in. All those days in Ireland Crowe had been suppressing these terrible facts. Now that he had raised the subject with John Burke, he could hardly just dismiss it. He told his young friend almost all he knew.

“But what is being done?”

“What would you suggest?”

“I simply do not understand why, or how, such things can be kept secret.”

“Perhaps they won't be. After all, I'm telling you.”

 

 

Crowe made no mention of the talk he'd had with Traeger before he had left for Ireland. That clerical jurist's training stood him in good stead once again when John asked what was being done. An investigation, secret, needless to say, was in the works. And Crowe couldn't wait until it started. He figured that most of the history of the modern world had gone on in secret. If the attempt on the life of a pope had not called forth the real explanation of what had happened back then, it was doubtful that these recent murders would.